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August 19, 2007

Supposedly an intellect for the ages, Karl Rove appeared on Fox News Sunday this morning and said this about himself and the controversies he's created: "Let’s face it. I mean, I’m a myth, and they’re — you know, I’m Beowulf. You know, I’m Grendel. I don’t know who I am. But they’re after me.”

My diagnosis--no doubt tinctured by the fact that I think Karl Rove is a bad, bad man--is that Rove is a diletantte who often tries to impress people with literary references that don't necessarily make sense. Beowulf and Grendel, after all, battled each other. Presumably, Rove sees himself as Beowulf and perhaps feels under attack--like the city of Heorot--by Grendel. But I think the allusion he was looking for here was Moby Dick. He's the White Whale (a great description for Karl Rove if ever there was one) and congressional Democrats are Ahab. Or something to that effect.

Either way, Think Progress has the video. Give it a looksee and then carry on with your Sunday secure in the knowledge that Karl Rove isn't nearly as smart as he wishes he was or as others give him credit for being.

August 18, 2007

As a physicist, I think this is sort of an interesting way to look at economies and economic development. As a blogger, though, I think it confirms a pretty banal point: that regions of the world without diverse or fungible resources don't tend to have strong economies.

Top Commerce and Treasury Departments officials appeared with Republican candidates and doled out millions in federal money in battleground congressional districts and states after receiving White House political briefings detailing GOP election strategy.

Political appointees in the Treasury Department received at least 10 political briefings from July 2001 to August 2006, officials familiar with the meetings said. Their counterparts at the Commerce Department received at least four briefings — all in the election years of 2002, 2004 and 2006....

Under the Hatch Act, Cabinet members are permitted to attend political briefings and appear with members of Congress. But Cabinet members and other political appointees aren't permitted to spend taxpayer money with the aim of benefiting candidates.

During the briefings at Treasury and Commerce, then-Bush administration political director Ken Mehlman and other White House aides detailed competitive congressional districts, battleground election states and key media markets and outlined GOP strategy for getting out the vote.

Commerce and Treasury political appointees later made numerous public appearances and grant announcements that often correlated with GOP interests, according to a review of the events by McClatchy Newspapers. The pattern raises the possibility that the events were arranged with the White House's political guidance in mind.

I don't want to say too much here, because I'll probably be following this stuff pretty closely for The Corporate Masters. But the issue with the Hatch Act is that unless the Congress is willing to impeach the cabinet members in violation, then enforcement falls to the president. And as is clear from his record, George W. Bush takes the Hatch Act seriously sees the Hatch Act as a minor nuisance and is perfectly willing to let his administrators sit in obvious violation. So unless I'm missing something obvious, I don't really see any recriminations coming down the pipe.

But here's yet another example of McClatchy using its resources exactly as a news agency should. One is tempted to suggest that Marisa Taylor and Kevin Hall deserve to be elevated to high positions at major national papers. But then again, one is also tempted to suggest that that might mean the end of their opportunity to do serious journalism.

I'm fairly confident that if Medicare was universalized tomorrow--if, say, Dennis Kucinich, were king and he could do that sort of thing--it would be a huge disaster. I think critics ignore Kucinich's plan not just because he's so far back in the polls, and not just because his idea isn't politically feasible, but because it's also not a very good idea. Yet.

Starting from here, though, one can take the position that the bureaucracy should be fixed so that, in the longer-term, government is providing all people with health care, or one can take the position that the federal government shouldn't be any more involved than it already is in peoples' lives. This is, I think, the essential difference between John Edwards and Mitt Romney on health care. Edwards' idea is that Medicare should be allowed to compete with private insurers in a mixed public-private system that will almost surely see Medicare slowly grow and outperform its competitors (and then draw in more people, etc.) That is a good way to prime Medicare and wary citizens for its eventual universality. And the flip side is that if Medicare happens to perform terribly when it's expanded, then, hey, to the spoils will go the victors in the market. Everybody will still be insured, but only the suckers (and old people) will have Medicare.

Romney, by contrast, doesn't see a role for expanding Medicare at all. And as a Republican, you can't count out the possibility that he'll at some point try to actually scale it back. These are important differences. And I think they explain where the two men are coming from when they use this rhetoric. Via Benen:

Edwards: "Do you think the American people want the
same people who responded to Hurricane Katrina to run their health-care
system?"

These statements, it turns out, are completely consistent with both men's philosophies on expanding access to health care. The difference is that Edwards wants to see the federal bureaucracy, the Katrina bureaucracy, mature to such a degree that it can handle 300,000,000 people on its Medicare roles. Romney, by contrast, sees the federal bureaucracy degraded to the FEMA level and thinks that's just fine as long as the private sector steps in to pick up the slack.

It seems like earlier I had intended to do something interesting with my Friday. What I did instead was troll the YouTube comedy category in, I guess, a feeble attempt to enjoy myself on the cheap. Instead, I learned that YouTube's comedy category isn't even the tiniest bit funny. Seriously, this stuff is picked by editors who work at frickin' YouTube, world's most awesome corporation. You'd think they'd be pretty hilarious people. You'd be wrong, though. This is the best clip I found. Happy weekend.

August 17, 2007

My big takeaway from Vancouver (my first visit as an adult) was that it's really, really nice there. It was recently named "most livable city" in the world and I guess I can understand that. California gives a similar award every year and invariably that award goes to a city like Thousand Oaks--perfectly nice if you're a 40 year old accountant with a couple of kids, but a bit bleached otherwise. If you're familiar with Seattle, then this comparison will make sense to you: Vancouver is a lot like Queen Ann Hill if Queen Ann Hill was its own megalopolis.

At the same time I did eat duck's feet. Twice. Fine, fine dim sum, if you like that sort of thing.

Tony Snow is dropping hints that he might not stick around much longer as President Bush’s press secretary. In a radio interview with conservative talk-radio host Hugh Hewitt on Wednesday, Snow said he likely would bail out as White House press secretary sometime before Bush leaves office in January 2009.

“I’ve already made it clear I’m not going to be able to go the distance, but that’s primarily for financial reasons,” he said. “I’ve told people when my money runs out, then I’ve got to go.” He wouldn’t say when that might be.

Ok. God knows if anybody in the Bush administration has a real reason to step aside it's Tony Snow. But it can't be because he's going broke. Here his is at World Net Daily discussing his salary:

Q: If I could just ask you
what, as a federal officer, you are paid now, I will not ask what you
were paid before. How much did you sacrificed to take this job?

MR. SNOW: I think my salary's like $162,000 or $163,000.

I realize he was a media big shot GOP shill before he became a federally subsidized GOP shill, meaning he probably took a significant pay cut in the switch from Fox News to the West Wing. but between the salary and the benefits it's hard for me to imagine that he's losing money day in and day out as White House Press Secretary. Then again, I don't exactly have a sense for how Washington Republicans actually live. Large, obviously. Large enough, I suppose, that they have to destroy national policy in order to keep with it.

Q Back in 1991, you talked about how military action in Iraq
would be the classic definition of a quagmire. Have you been disturbed
to see how right you were? Or people certainly said that you were
exactly on target in your analysis back in 1991 of what would happen if
the U.S. tried to go in --

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, I stand by what I said in '91. But look
what's happened since then -- we had 9/11. We've found ourselves in a
situation where what was going on in that part of the globe and the
growth and development of the extremists, the al Qaeda types that are
prepared to strike the United States demonstrated that we weren't safe
and secure behind our own borders. We weren't in Iraq when we got hit
on 9/11. But we got hit in '93 at the World Trade Center, in '96 at
Khobar Towers, or '98 in the East Africa embassy bombings, 2000, the USS
Cole. And of course, finally 9/11 right here at home. They continued
to hit us because we didn't respond effectively, because they believed
we were weak. They believed if they killed enough Americans, they could
change our policy because they did on a number of occasions. That day
has passed. That all ended with 9/11.

So this, as near as I can tell, would be his answer to any questions about the discrepancies between what he said so famously in 1994 and what he's saying now. Which is to say that he'd not answer the questions at all and instead attempt to implicate Iraq in the '90s bombings and in September 11. He'd also entirely ignore the fact that--no matter how many acts of terrorism America suffered--nothing changed about Iraq that would make overthrowing the regime any less of a quagmire.

Also that last bit: "They believed if they killed enough Americans, they could
change our policy because they did on a number of occasions." I'd say we proved them wrong they were entirely correct in their assumptions. And to devastating effect for the United States.

Documents provided Thursday to House Democrats by FBI Director Robert
Mueller reinforced the sense among Democrats and critics of the Bush
Administration that Alberto Gonzales perjured himself before the Senate
Judiciary committee about the physical condition of then-Attorney
General John Ashcroft, as the White House attempted to seek his
reauthorization of a controversial warrantless wiretapping program....

In response to questions from Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA), Gonzales
insisted that Ashcroft seemed lucid in the hospital, where the White
House aides sought his reauthorization of a domestic surveillance
program.

"Obviously, there was concern about General Ashcroft's
condition," Gonzales told Specter, "and we would not have sought, nor
did we intend, to get any approval from General Ashcroft if, in fact,
he wasn't fully competent to make that decision."

But Mueller's
notes belie that contention. One sentence, in particular, indicates
that Ashcroft was anything other than fully competent: "AG in chair; is
feeble, barely articulate, clearly stressed."

So much is still not known about the other sides of this controversy (most notably whether or not Gonzales perjured himself when he hinted at a distinction between the NSA's Warrantless Wiretapping Program and "other" surveillance activities). I'm not really actively reporting on that, but the two finest sources in probably all of journalism for information about just that question are Spackerman and the mysterious Anonymous Liberal. Read their work daily.

Wall Street Journal writer Christopher Cooper has found that some of John Edwards' Fortress Hedge Funds included investments in companies that have foreclosed on Katrina victims. When Cooper informed him of this, Edwards pledged to divest from those funds and to provide direct aid to the one-time owners of the 34 homes affected by foreclosure.

All fine now, I suppose. Except the implicit takeaway from the article is that investing in companies that engage in predatory lending is perfectly OK as long as you happen not to have strong feelings about predatory lending. Cooper writes:

Mr. Edwards is hardly the only presidential candidate to field
criticism over his business. Republican Mitt Romney has come under
attack for his time at Bain Capital, a private-equity firm that has
purchased companies and forced layoffs. He and Mr. Edwards, along with
Illinois Democratic Sen. Barack Obama, have taken hits for investing in
companies that did business in Sudan. Republican Rudy Giuliani has
fielded criticism for his consulting company's or his law firm's
associations with troubled businesses and with Venezuela, whose
socialist leader harshly criticizes the U.S.

Some blogger out there should do a quick count of all the stories that have been written about John Edwards' hair, his house, and his hedge funds (all of which have intended to imply some sort of hypocrisy) and compare that number to the number of stories that have been written about Romney and Bain, Obama and Sudan investments, and Giuliani and Venezuela. I think the results of that count would be... enligthening.

I see no reason not to let the odd idea that Dick Cheney is some sort of highly charismatic lunatic take hold, even if it is wildly off base. Matt, on the other hand...

I've gotta stop Jason Zengerle and Ross Douthat from propagating some kind of revisionist notion whereby Dick Cheney (in Zengerle's words) "could well benefit from a round of media appearances - because, while his views may be crazy and alarmist, his public presentation of them isn't."

I realize that I'm some sort of journalist, and am supposed to call things as I see them. And, of course, as I see it Zengerle and Douthat are very obviously wrong about this. But as a freedom loving American, I can think of almost nothing that would more quickly steer the country back on course than to convince the powers that be--through some devious manipulation--that Dick Cheney should be the policy spokesman for this administration.

And in so doing suggests, "Rove has argued that the Republican Party will need to appeal to
minorities or gradually decline."

"We can't be the party of America," he
says, "and get 13 percent of the African American vote." And given
demographic trends, it is hard to imagine that Republicans will remain
a national party if they alienate Latinos. Looking back at his career,
Rove is particularly proud that "when we ran in Texas in 1998, among
the statewide Republican ticket, a minority of the candidates were
white men."

Thus, Rove is a cultural pluralist, broadly sympathetic to the full array of wants and needs of America's largest minority communities, right? Well, actually, totally not. By my count, the best thing Rove ever did for Latinos was alienate enough people in Washington to ensure that the president's middling immigration reform proposal--offered in the spirit of appeasing business interests--went down in flames. Beyond that his attempts to win over large segments of both communities was to wedge them away from Democrats by playing to black and latino cultural prejudices, real and imagined. This effort failed as much because it was transparently opportunistic as because on economic and community issues, from health care to Katrina, Rove and the administration ably proved that the purpose of winning over these communities had nothing at all to do with real cultural empathy, and everything to do with--in Rove's own words--becoming "the party of America". The permanent Republican majority.

If you asked me what was wrong with big-league political reporting in
this country, I'd say its biggest problem is that is has too much in common
with big league sports writing. Reporters like Adam Nagourney and John
Harris don't lack for expertise in politics, after all. They have
trainloads of it. Their problem is precisely that they treat politics
the way sportwriters treat baseball: as a game, in which both sides are
equivalent, you're not supposed to play favorites, you favor polls and
statistics over substantive (but boring!) analysis, trivia is a source
of endless fascination, and a clever bon mot is irresistable regardless
of whether it's actually fair or accurate.

When you hear Woody Paige or Jay Marriotti say something
jaw-droppingly asinine about Barry Bonds or Tiger Woods or whoever,
remember that these guys are [like big-name political journalists] at the very top of their profession.

These are to some extent two arguments whizzing past each other. But I think Kevin has the best of this one. Forget for a moment the fact that high-tier political reporters and high-tier sports reporters share many of the same flaws, because it almost doesn't matter. Somehow it works out that Americans who follow, say, baseball are extremely fluent in the history, statistics, controversies, and technical minutae of baseball, while Americans who follow politics know politics at only the most superficial level. Somewhere along the way, sports fans become very well educated while people interested in politics get terribly short changed.

It's wrong to think, though, that this disparity is due to the fact that sports reporters know their beats better. Lacking a shred of evidence, I'd chalk this up to an intensity difference. There are millions of sports fans in the country, a large subset of whom are deeply committed to their favorite sports, and, as such, it's easy to find reams of serious sports analysis on ESPN roundups, live events, and in newspapers nationwide. But of the millions of Americans who follow politics, only a rarified set of political junkies--a tiny market share--demand to know politics to the same extent that prominent bloggers do. So we get Nagourney and Harris. The solution to this, though, is that the Nagourneys and Harrises of the world should provide the right information in their articles.

Yes we should hope reporters have great amounts of expertise. I think it's likely, though, that at top tier newspapers they already have more than enough. What they lack, though, is a sense that the information they choose to report is much too superficial to educate their readers.

Effectively, I think it's reasonable to say that there never was an Iraqi government. But inasmuch as there was one, Ithink now it's indisputable. Iraqslogger reports:

Four major Iraqi political parties unveiled an new governing coalition of moderate Shia and Kurdish parties on Tuesday.

The deal formalized an alliance between Maliki's Dawa Party, Vice
President Adel Abdel Mehdi's Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council (SIIC),
Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and Massud Barzani's Kurdish
Democratic Party (PDK), giving the four parties a parliamentary
majority. If the alliance remains intact, they will be positioned to
push through legislative initiative.

Notice that the list doesn't include the Sunni alliance, which is still boycotting the parliament--a fact which no doubt plays a role in the formation of this new alliance. There are seemingly endless technical implications to this reconfiguration, including how much power an alliance this size will actually have (seemingly very little, although the details are a bit unclear to me and out of my league).

But to me, what's more important is this:

The Sunni parties of the Iraqi Accordance Front (IAF) recently commenced a boycott of the government, withdrawing their 44-seats.

According to VOI, Talabani said they had contacted the largest Sunni party of the bloc, the Iraqi Islamic Party, in an attempt to involve it in the agreement, but it responded "that the circumstances were not appropriate."

The AP reports Iraq's Sunni vice-president, Tariq al-Hashemi, and his moderate Iraqi Islamic party refused to join despite assurances from the country's Kurdish president, Jalal Talabani, that the door was "always open".

Recap: Out in the provinces we're arming Sunni militias. In Baghdad we're trying to achieve meaningful political reconciliation between the major players in a government that has extremely limited influence anywhere. These two initiatives are, as noted many times before, entirely at odds with each other. They've led Maliki, according to some reports, to consider providing additional arms to Shiite militias to counterbalance the growing strength of the enemy Sunnis. And so, faced essentially with a choice between working to extend the reach of the political system and endorsing continued American-fueled violence in the provinces, the Sunnis in Baghdad chose the latter. Violence, they have concluded, is their best hope for having even a modest say in the future of their country. And they may well be strategically correct. But that's in large part because the Bush administration's wholly incongruent decisions have driven the Iraqi government into irrelevance and, perhaps ultimately towards complete disintegration.

August 15, 2007

YouTube thinks Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert should testify on their behalf, and I agree. The causality here is much more clear than they were during the Napster controversy. When the music industry was in decline, it was easy (and superficially plausible) for the RIAA to suggest that file-sharing programs were the culprit. It was difficult--if perhaps correct--to make the case that the music industry would have been in worse shape if it wasn't for Napster. With Stewart and Colbert now soaringly popular, though, the the argument should be much easier to make, and might even be demonstrable empirically. Somebody out there should take the time to impose Daily Show ratings on to this Alexa image.

I've argued before that the Netroots should spearhead an effort to put together a list of dozens of Bush appointees (cronies, sons and daughters and spouses of cronies, etc.) so ill-suited for their jobs that the re-emergence of a functioning bureaucracy is actually predicated upon their removal. That list should be presented to the Democratic nominee next year, and the nominee should face massive pressure to, if elected, fire those people as an early order of business if. But is this legal? Is it, like the attorney firings, massively shady? Cass Sunstein explores the question:

Under President Reagan, the executive branch argued, with real vigor,
on behalf of a strongly unitary executive. The Supreme Court has
rejected those arguments. But many issues remain open. We do not know,
for example, exactly what kind of power the president may exercise over
the independent agencies. (Suppose that President Hillary Clinton or
Rudy Giuliani wants to get rid of Bush appointees to the NLRB, the FCC,
the FTC, and the SEC; can she or he do so? What if Clinton and Giuliani
think that the policy judgments of the Bush appointees are not merely
bad but terrible?) In approaching the open questions, recent presidents
have tended to continue to argue that the executive is strongly unitary.

I realize this can be dangerous territory, but continue to think this is a good idea if it is really, truly a one-off project. And if recent history is any indication, even a strongly adverse Congress is pretty much no match for the unitary executive theory. If the Congress stays Democratic--and all indications are that it will--I don't think you'll hear a peep from them about the firings.

I don't point to this approvingly. I don't even really point to it disapprovingly. It's just obviously what happens when the president takes a step like adding Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps to our ever-growing list of terrorist organizations: He provide the people who want us to be at war with Iran another high-bore piece of rhetorical ammunition.

The White House and State Department have reportedly decided to designate Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps as a terrorist group. Given that the Iranian ambassador in Baghdad, Hassan Kazemi Qomi, is a commander in the Qods Force, an elite Revolutionary Guards' unit, does this also mean that it is U.S. policy to negotiate with terrorists?

Oddly enough, speaking on Bush's terms, Rubin's right--the president has left himself almost no wiggle room. It's going to be very difficult for Bush to explain to his supporters why he's not going after this terrorist organization that's supposedly killing U.S. troops. The difference between me and Rubin, of course, is that I don't think George Bush should have done this whereas Rubin thinks we should have been at war with Iran months ago.

Reuel Marc Gerecht--who's about as Serious as Serious People get--points me to a compelling reason why those of us who want to see our foreign policy become less terrible ought to resist the temptation to lazily use the term Al Qaeda in Iraq. Namely that it's not particularly accurate and--since the U.S. has a legitimate bone to pick with the real Al Qaeda--it needlessly stirs up the passions of people who might otherwise be on the side of withdrawal. Also, any rhetorical term people like Gerecht use really ought to be viewed suspiciously. And then there's this:

To [Obama's] credit, he sees that Iraq and al Qaeda do not define
Muslims and Islam. What he does not seem to grasp--and the Bush
administration is no better--is that America is the cutting edge of a
modernity that has convulsed Islam as a faith and a civilization. This
collision will likely become more violent, not less, as Muslims more
completely enter the ethical free fall that comes as modernity
pulverizes the world of our ancestors. Barack Obama's newly devised
"Mobile Development Teams," which will bring together "personnel from
the State Department, the Pentagon, and USAID . . . to turn the tide
against extremism" are unlikely to make America more attractive to
devout Muslims who know that America is the leading force in destroying
the world that they love. The senator can leave Iraq, shut down
Guantánamo, apologize for Abu Ghraib, and build "secular" schools all
over Pakistan, and he will not change this fact. This is the deep well
from which al Qaeda draws.

Boiled down--and coming from Gerecht--I think this means we should stay in Iraq because no matter how we behave in the Muslim world, terrorists will still draw from a deep well, and so we should continue to louse everything up over there. Which is about the most insipid argument I think I've ever heard. Muslim terrorist groups draw from a well of people who believe, or can be convinced, that U.S. policies in the Muslim world are bad for Muslims. Under such circumstances, recruiting becomes easier when our policies in the Muslim world are actually bad for Muslims. It's not that doing everything Obama suggests will kill off Al Qaeda by drying up its pool of participants, but not torturing Muslims and not bombing their countries will in fact make that pool of participants smaller and easier to fight in reasonable ways. It also happens to be a morally sound way forward.

U.S. officials say the number of civilian casualties in the Iraqi
capital is down 50 percent. But U.S. officials declined to provide
specific numbers, and statistics gathered by McClatchy Newspapers don't
support the claim.

The number of car bombings in July actually
was 5 percent higher than the number recorded last December, according
to the McClatchy statistics, and the number of civilians killed in
explosions is about the same.

I suppose they could have attempted to go one step further by asking DoD to square the data (and then getting stonewalled), but I really don't see a big problem here. Powerful people say X, X is called into question by independent reporting. Good journalism! McClatchy in general is outstripping all of its competitors on many metrics and deserves to be praised for it. Unfortunately for them, they're getting much less attention than they would be if they were a generally larger organization.

After all the hand-wringing about domestic wiretapping, there's barely a peep (and certainly no legislative wrangling) when Mike McConnell, Director of National Intelligence endows Michael Chertoff, Homeland Security Secretary, with the power to train U.S. spy satellites on American citizens. Wall Street Journal is unfortunately subscription only. Here's a link, just in case. Here's a snippet:

The U.S.'s top intelligence official has greatly
expanded the range of federal and local authorities who can get access
to information from the nation's vast network of spy satellites in the
U.S.

The decision, made three months ago by Director of
National Intelligence Michael McConnell, places for the first time some
of the U.S.'s most powerful intelligence-gathering tools at the
disposal of domestic security officials. The move was authorized in a
May 25 memo sent to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff asking
his department to facilitate access to the spy network on behalf of
civilian agencies and law enforcement....

According to officials, one of the department's first objectives will
be to use the network to enhance border security, determine how best to
secure critical infrastructure and help emergency responders after
natural disasters. Sometime next year, officials will examine how the
satellites can aid federal and local law-enforcement agencies, covering
both criminal and civil law. The department is still working on
determining how it will engage law enforcement officials and what kind
of support it will give them.

As these things tend to go, civil libertarians will raise their typical objections. In response, both DNI and DHS will assure everybody that the expansion is crucial for national security, is in the hands of diligent professionals, and will never be used outside of strict, specified guidelines. Then, years down the line, something will leak, or be declassified, and we'll find out that the civil libertarians were perfectly correct to raise a big fuss.